The Washington Post
Wednesday, February 16, 2000
1) U.S. Aid to Colombia by Robert E. White
2) Yes on Aid to Columbia - Editorial
3) Shades of Vietnam by Robert E. White
U.S. Aid to Colombia
With Robert E. White, a former ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay, is president of the Center for International Policy.
Robert E. White, president of the Center for International Policy and former U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay and El Salvador, will be online Wednesday, Feb. 16 at 1 p.m. to discuss the Clinton administration's proposal to send $1.3 billion in aid to Colombia to combat drug trafficking and the insurgent Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who are supported by drug profits.
Congress will begin discussion on the Clinton administration's proposal, one of the largest of its kind, next week. Supporters of the program, including The Washington Post editorial page, contend the anti-drug rationale is sufficient to support this billion dollar aid package. Critics like Robert E. White say that such a proposal "amounts to intervention in another country's civil war." In a Feb. 8 Washington Post column, White argues that "neither the president nor the secretary of state has given the American people any coherent explanation of what is at stake in Colombia or of how massive military assistance can do anything but make matters worse."
During his 25-year Foreign Service career, White specialized in Latin American affairs with particular emphasis on Central America. In his early career he served in Honduras and Nicaragua. Among other posts he held were Latin American Director of the Peace Corps, Deputy Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States, Ambassador to Paraguay and El Salvador. In 1977 and 1978, White served as the President's Special Representative to the Inter-American Conference on Education, Science and Culture.
After retiring from the Foreign Service in 1981, White served as a Senior Associate for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. White is currently the president of the Center for International Policy.
YES ON AID TO COLOMBIA/EDITORIAL
THE REVOLUTIONARY Armed Forces of Colombia (known by the Spanish acronym
FARC) have been fighting for power for nearly four decades. They have
little support among Colombia's people, but thanks to payoffs from the
drug producers they protect, the FARC has grown into a 15,000-man army
equipped with the best weapons and communications technology money can
buy--better, by and large, than the Colombian army has. Small wonder,
then, that the FARC now controls nearly a third of the country, including
a Switzerland-sized zone ceded by President Andres Pastrana--a token of
negotiating good faith that the FARC has not seen fit to reciprocate.
Clearly the FARC threatens the stability and territorial integrity of
Latin America's fourth-largest country. Does that make it a threat to U.S.
interests as well? The Clinton administration says yes; it is proposing a
two-year, $1.3 billion aid package aimed principally at improving the
Colombian military's equipment, mobility and training. The largest
component would be $385 million for 30 new Black Hawk helicopters to help
ferry three U.S.-trained battalions into action. The administration says
that to fight the FARC is to fight drug trafficking and, by extension,
street crime in America. Critics assert that U.S. military aid portends a
counterinsurgency war of the kind El Salvador waged during the late Cold
War, or worse, an Andean Vietnam.
We agree that the anti-drug rationale is a distinction without a difference--but we support aid for Colombia nevertheless. Indeed, we wonder why preventing an unpopular and thuggish army with a long record of kidnapping and assassination (including, recently, the assassination of three American citizens) should necessarily be a more suspect objective than breaking up one of the drug cartels' protection forces. As always, such an effort must be weighed not only against the undeniable costs of plunging in but also against the potential costs of doing nothing. Colombia's armed forces have themselves been corrupt and linked to brutal paramilitary forces that also protect drug production and kill even more civilians than the FARC does. Accordingly, the administration has used the promise of aid as leverage to demand that President Pastrana purge the worst officers, and has pledged to abide scrupulously by the Leahy amendment requiring that the U.S.-trained battalions be vetted for human-rights probity, soldier by
soldier. Mr. Pastrana already has forced some generals into retirement and claims improvement in the army's human rights record. Presumably, if the army can carry the fight to the FARC, its dependence on paramilitaries could lessen. The best reason for the aid, however, is that it will help in the search for a negotiated settlement to the war, which is the strategic objective of both President Pastrana and President Clinton. In this respect, critics who say the administration's proposal would complicate peace talks are falling for the FARC's bluff. In fact, the FARC will not bargain in good faith unless confronted with a credible military threat. In recent days the FARC has quite visibly emphasized its commitment to negotiations in ways that include an agreement to meetings with government negotiators in Sweden. This show of peacefulness, while probably only a show, is a sign of what the FARC feels obliged to do when confronted with the mere possibility of American aid to Colombia. An appropriately conditio
ned and decisively executed American commitment could make them, at last, bargain for real.
SHADES OF VIETNAM
By Robert E. White
Although President Clinton seems unaware of it, the $1.6 billion he is requesting to fight coca production in Colombia amounts to intervention in another country's civil war. Neither the president nor the secretary of state has given the American people any coherent explanation of what is at stake in Colombia or of how massive military assistance can do anything but make matters worse.
Americans have always been skeptical about the wisdom of intervening in the civil wars of other countries. Although our diplomatic history is studded with lapses, the doctrine of nonintervention still carries considerable weight--enough to require that those advocating military excursions be able to justify them in terms of global threats to national security.
Our intervention in El Salvador's struggle did not truly constitute intervention, President Reagan argued, because the revolutionaries were not fighting in their own cause but as hirelings of Moscow and Havana. The rationale for involving the United States in Colombia's civil war rests on the equally specious ground that the FARC--the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia--are not an authentic insurgency but an armed drug cartel that fights to protect illicit profits--"narco-guerrillas" to quote from the charged vocabulary of the White House drug policy adviser, Gen. Barry McCaffrey.
The largest component of the military assistance, titled "Push into Southern Colombia," calls for $600 million to train two additional special counternarcotics battalions with 30 Blackhawk helicopters and 33 Huey helicopters so the army "can access this remote and undeveloped region of Colombia." Some of the funding would "provide shelter and employment to the Colombian people who will be displaced." Although there is $145 million for crop substitution, the emphasis will continue to be on aerial spraying of herbicides to destroy the coca leaf. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is a counterinsurgency strategy packaged as a counternarcotics program.
To Gen. McCaffrey, with a thin background in foreign policy and a mandate to win the war on narcotics, it must seem logical to reduce complex political, economic and social forces to one manageable target and attack it with military force. But is it too much to hope that experienced diplomats will grasp the elementary proposition that an insurgency that has acquired the strength and cohesion necessary to dominate 40 percent of the national territory represents something authentic in the history of Colombia, something not adequately explained by references to illicit commerce?
Has it truly escaped senior administration aides that the Colombian civil war is more about massacres of civilians and selective assassinations than armed confrontation? Does it really not matter that to declare war on the FARC puts us in league with a Colombian military that has longstanding ties to the drug-dealing, barbaric paramilitaries that commit more than 75 percent of the human rights violations afflicting that violence-torn country?
It is curious that a government as sophisticated as ours should cling to the naive belief that spraying with herbicides can do anything but drive the campesino cultivators deeper into the jungle. The campesinos grow coca not just because it commands bonanza prices but because the traffickers' planes land nearby and pay cash on the barrelhead.
Alternative production--rubber and palm oil, for example--could compete because their prices, while lower, are more stable. But the isolated farmers cannot get their crops to the city. The $1.3 billion in the Colombia aid package for war could be more constructively used to build farm-to-market highways that would peacefully carry the government's authority into this remote zone.
Nowhere in the official statements on Colombia will Congress find any discussion of risks vs. rewards or any measurement of objectives in relation to resources. Recall that in El Salvador, our bloody, divisive 12-year pursuit of military victory proved fruitless. We finally settled for a U.N.-brokered accord that granted the guerrillas many of their demands.
The FARC-controlled territory that this program casually commits us to reconquer is 20 times as large as El Salvador--roughly the size of California. The Colombian military has no experience in carrying the war to the insurgents. What will happen when FARC troops, at home in jungle and savanna, repel the army and shoot down our helicopters? Will we then swallow the bitter pill of political-military defeat? Not if Vietnam and Central America are any guide. Far more likely we will plunge deeper into the quagmire.
